Common Information Model (“CIM”) is a standard set forth by the Distributed Management Task Force (“DMTF”). CIM is an object oriented model to represent a wide variety of systems in a standard and neutral way, and is commonly referred to as the CIM schema. CIM is an open standard that defines how managed elements in an IT environment are represented as a common set of objects and relationships between them. CIM promotes consistent management of these managed elements, independent of their manufacturer or provider. That way a common component such as a server or a network router will be represented in a way that all management tools that use CIM will understand.
A related standard is Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM, also defined by DMTF) which defines a particular implementation of CIM, including protocols for discovering and accessing such CIM implementations. To create a standard way to access CIM, a working group of the DMTF developed a technique where CIM data can be accessed using the HTTP protocol used by the world wide web. Another standard used represents the CIM data in XML format. This gives us a common model for system management, a standard way to represent that model, and a standard way to access the model.
A CIM object manager (“CIMOM”) is essentially a server for servicing CIM requests. A CIM provider provides data representing a single entity. In the case of hardware, there will theoretically be an instance of a CIM object representing each component, including, for example, each processor, video card, etc. Each of these sources has its own interface, some of which are very complex. There could be a representation of each component in only one, many, or all of the available data sources.
A primitive interface for using CIM is an SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) CIM browser. More powerful interfaces tend to be expensive and have a significant learning curve.